8 useful social media statistics for 2015

We've identified eight of the most telling social media statistics for 2015 - including one social network that's signing up 120k new users a day.

We’ve identified eight of the most telling social media statistics for 2015. What are the key channels to build your social media strategy on, and why?

Instagram grew 50% in 9 months and is now bigger than Twitter

Instagram grew by 50% between March and December 2014 and exceeded the 300 million user mark. This means that the photo-sharing social network is now bigger than Twitter (284 million) in terms of active users and, crucially, with much faster growth momentum. Instagram is already becoming a hot space for brands due to it’s amazing engagement rate (see below), but now it also has scale. See our recent review of Instagram statistics here.

A photo posted by Instagram (@instagram) on Dec 12, 2014 at 8:11am PST

Organic Facebook reach drops to 2% for most pages

Certainly the most discussed statistic of 2014 appeared in a blog post by Marshall Manson from Ogilvy Social in March. He demonstrated how organic reach on Facebook had dropped to an average of just 6% and for Pages with more than 500k Likes, just 2%. Following this revelation of ‘Facebook Zero’, as it became known, the Ogilvy team are confidently predicting Twitter Zero for 2015 when Twitter is expected to launch it’s own EdgeRank-style algorithm. Who’d argue with them.

In June Facebook had more video views than YouTube

In June 2014, for the first time ever, Facebook (12.3 billion) served more video views than YouTube (11.3 billion). While this was helped by Facebook’s decision to auto-play videos, resulting in low video completion rates compared to YouTube, it is still a clear marker in the sand. There is little doubt that Facebook is preparing to eat YouTube’s dinner in 2015.

Snapchat is growing at a rate of 56% a year

Snapchat grew 56% in 2014 and remains the fastest growing messaging app. Interestingly, though, Facebook’s strategy of making Facebook Messenger a stand-alone app seems to be working. It comes in at a close second in the app league with Instagram just behind. So, aside from SnapChat, what’s the messaging app to watch in 2015? We’d suggest WeChat, the Chinese app that looks to have missed this list but has 400+ million members.

Tumblr is still signing up 120,000 users… a day!

Tumblr’s active user-base grew 120% in the last 6 months of 2014 while Facebook’s grew just 2%. In sheer numbers Tumblr’s growth is quite phenomenal. The network is apparently signing up 120,000 new users every day and yet, anecdotally at least, Tumblr remains one of the least exploited social networks by marketers and also advertisers, of which there are currently only 150!

50% of devices on corporate networks will be mobile

As I reported last month, 2015 is the year by which Forrester predicted 50% of devices on corporate networks would be mobile. If you combine this with the knowledge that Generation Y, who spend on average 2 hours a day on their smartphone and use 6 apps a day, will form 50% of the workforce by 2020, you get a picture of where internal communications are going. Do mobile comms mean social comms? No, but it’s getting very close.

Instagram gets 50x more engagement than Twitter

This was the finding of a study from Socialbakers earlier in December 2014, which found that top brands have an engagement rate of 3.31% on Instagram, compared to 0.07% on Twitter. Now, Twitter will dispute that figure, since 3rd party measurement tools like Social Bakers don’t include link clicks, Tweet expands and profile clicks – a large percentage of Twitter’s own engagement rate – but other studies, such as this one from Forrester, echo the findings.

Gangnam Style has been viewed 2,182,109,637 times

Early in December, PSY’s ‘Gangnam Style’ broke YouTube’s view counter when it exceeded the potential of their 32-integer set up. The feature has since been extended to 64 integers, which should allow PSY many more views. The video has been viewed 2,182,109,637 times, and counting.

OK – so have I missed anything critical (I most certainly must have)? Let me know and we can argue about it in comments.

In this article

Luke helps brands to use social and digital media more effectively. With over 16 years of hands-on experience, his client list includes Burger King, VISA, British Airways and The Daily Telegraph. He is the founder of Our Social Times and Managing Director of OST Marketing, the award-winning agency.